Marc Ribot Quotes

I just love music gear, I'm a total geek all around.

And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.

Just because something has tubes doesn't mean it's the best. I mean, tubes are obviously good, but the circuit of this thing is designed well and it sounds good.

Rock music is electronic music, dependent entirely on electronic circuitry and amplification.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years' experience building electronic musical instruments.

I've been called 'the father of loud.'

Once upon a time, sound was new technology.

I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.

I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory.

I'm sure I'll go back again and record in the digital process.

Young people have decided they like to listen to music in a certain way, through ear buds, and that's fine with me as long as it doesn't bother them that they're not hearing 90 percent of the music that way.

I could talk about technique, theory and gear for days!

When I first started, all I had was the laptop and some cheap headphones. I ain't have no speakers. You know, no Rocket speakers or no MPC. No keyboard, none of that. It just was the laptop and the headphones. Going from there, it just teaches you a lot.

I went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.

The radio comes back even louder than you remember it.

I just recorded in studios, you know, people pressed the buttons for me. So I just started recording the bass lines and guitar parts with my voice, covering classical pieces, or just making up melodies so I could learn how to use it.

I'm a studio guy. That's really what I love the most. I'm so fascinated with audio gear and recording techniques and whatnot, it's pretty mesmerizing.

I can kind of envision one person with a lot of machines, tapes, and electronic set-ups...singi ng or speaking and using machines.

I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn't see a music device as having any importance at all - how fast it is, how many songs it can hold, and all that - he sees music itself to a person as a being the important thing.

With all tools at my disposal, I'm 100% into chasing tone and checking out new equipment and "geeking" out during sound check by taking too much time.

Dolby was in the driver's seat. "Surround Sound" was added. Now we had three speakers behind the screen, two more on the left side of the theater, and two on the right. A closely guarded secret about all this is that you hear the correct balance only if you're sitting in the center of the theater. On the left or right side, those speakers tend to dominate.

Maybe you play a melody twice. You play it once like you like it, and some parts that you don't like you can just switch. An eight-bar motive - you can just take it and put it in the front or back or something like that. It can save you 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars, a drum machine. That's why everybody uses it.

At the top of your lungs, shout and listen to the echoes. You must live life at the top of your voice!